Chapter 634: The Mysterious Encounter (1)
Ant telemetry crackled softly in Mikhailis’s ear, the tone sharper than usual and loaded with static urgency. Cold sweat prickled behind his neck the moment he recognized that pitch—the scouts only raised it when they found something brand-new or something hungry.
<Alert: Scout-Unit Theta-12 has flagged anomalous activity—junction tunnel, quadrant seven. Classification: Blight Variants. Status: Non-catalogued lifeforms detected.>
The words unfolded like a frost across his skull. His boot halted mid-step, heel hovering a finger-width above the spongy root floor. All at once the corridor’s hush pressed in, thick as sap. Blight variants? In this deep? Tightness coiled in his chest.
Below him the living passage throbbed—a gentle dop-dop heart-pulse muffled by layers of moss and time. Luminescent veins inside the roots brightened at the beat, scattering pale gold against his coat. Every pulse made the air quiver, the way low bass notes make glass quiver on a table.
He nudged the micro-toggle behind his ear. Rodion’s HUD overlaid the world in shimmering wireframes: curved walls, heat traces, drifting spore-particles rendered as emerald pinpricks. Down the passage, faint flecks curled in a slow helix, floating where no creature stood. Mikhailis’s pupils narrowed.
He swallowed. Same spore signature as the shard-insect at Elowen’s balcony, he remembered, but back then it was just one specimen. Here it’s an echo—the ghost of a ghost—like something molted its skin and kept crawling. A prickling thrill of discovery tangled with the caution in his gut.
Rodion sounded more intrigued than afraid, voice pitched a notch lower than usual. <Particle cluster shows inconsistent Brownian drift. Gravitational anomalies minimal. Conclusion: Spores possess rudimentary directive patterning—possibly pathfinding.>
Mikhailis’s right hand twitched toward his belt, fingers brushing the cool glass of an empty sample jar. Instinct barked Collect! Document! but another instinct—the one that enjoyed breathing—told him to wait.
Because the sentinels had noticed first.
Ten root-woven statues lined the corridor at polite intervals. Earlier he’d thought them mere decoration—tall elf-shaped figures carved from fused bark, gemstone eyes set into faces that never moved. Now an audible click-click cascaded down the line like dominos: wooden necks swiveling in perfect unison toward the drifting spores. The embedded gemstones bloomed amber; wards thrummed awake. An invisible tide of magic rolled out, raising gooseflesh along his forearms.
Heart thumping, Mikhailis froze mid-breath. A single cough, a careless sideways glance, and those things might decide his body mass would make excellent mulch.
Rodion’s tone flattened to clinical calm.